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Topic: Shakey's sauce recipe?? (Read 153907 times)

The oven was was an important aspect to the process . Three tiers , moving the pie often and changing levels to obtain the perfect pie was crutial..

Do remember how fast those girls could cut a pie ? Almost scary !

If a customer was a jerk we would put an anchovie in the very center of the pie so that eachinitial bite would have a hint of anchovie.... yeah , I was a teenager !

In 1983 I moved to Boise Id , I was so excited to find a Shakeys here , only to find that the franchise out here was horrible ! I tried to explain that other Shakeys made the best pizza ..everyone out here just thought I had real bad taste !

I managed a Domino's in St' Paul for 2 yrs during college . The product was cheap but the delivery was quick. No contest for qualilty.....

Grotto, you gave me some good ideas from your posts. I now think I need to get the best grade of foodservice products I can get my hands on. I have already obtained some Stanislaus and Escalon fresh-packed tomato products, including paste and prepared pizza sauce. Still not in possession of any fresh-packed puree, however. (Puree may have been fresh-packed back in the day; most purees are made from concentrate these days). I don't have enough zing yet.

Some of the other cheeses you see used in pizza cheese blends are muenster, romano, fontina, asagio, monterey jack, and colby.

I'm sure all of us would enjoy reading your further memories and the memories of your friends.

I'd like to say thanks to the contributors of this thread. Forum regulars like Pete and Mad Ernie have helped me create the 'kind of pizza I wanted to make'. A bit of info here and there were great. I now operate a small pizza restaurant in the Philippines, most of the game-changing techniques I got here. Thanks to you, people.

I'd like to say thanks to the contributors of this thread. Forum regulars like Pete and Mad Ernie have helped me create the 'kind of pizza I wanted to make'. A bit of info here and there were great. I now operate a small pizza restaurant in the Philippines, most of the game-changing techniques I got here. Thanks to you, people.

Keep it going!

Gee, thanks DeliveryGuy!

I'm not sure what help I have been, but I know from having read the posts on the Pizzamaking.com forum, Pete-zza, DNADan, Lydia, BTB, Essen, and probably countless others I can't think of right now, have helped me create and improve my pizza-making by galactic leaps and bounds. Since you are in the Philippines, I imagine you have at least some competition from Shakey's, as they became rather well-known there starting back in the 90's, as I understand. What kind of pizza have you been making? Do you have any pictures you can share with the rest of us?

I see that there is a decent want for the old Shakeys pizza sauce/skin..

If anyone is ever up in the Reno area, check out Boulevard Pizza.. The owners de-franchised themselves when Shakeys decided to change their ideals and recipes. You can go get the same pizza that you remember from back in the day. Including the ginormous knife used to cut the pies. They even have MoJos.. except the name had to be changed to Rojos.

I stumbled upon this thread and I had to share this info with everyone

Bill, even though the quote you posted was from 2004, no one has yet posted the "original" sauce formula. Ponerspal never returned to this thread. One additional problem is defining what the original formula is, as it changed over the years.

The people who posted here and worked at Shakey's all worked there at a time when Shakey's provided the stores with a bag of seasonings for the sauce. No one ever reported that they had to mix seasonings and spices from raw, bulk spices.

I see that there is a decent want for the old Shakeys pizza sauce/skin..

If anyone is ever up in the Reno area, check out Boulevard Pizza.. The owners de-franchised themselves when Shakeys decided to change their ideals and recipes. You can go get the same pizza that you remember from back in the day. Including the ginormous knife used to cut the pies. They even have MoJos.. except the name had to be changed to Rojos.

I stumbled upon this thread and I had to share this info with everyone

Thanks for posting. That pizza looks great, and does have a Shakey's quality-look to it. I've never been to Reno, but now I am thinking I need to change that.

Ernie, I took a look at the web site of Boulevard Pizza, actually located in the city of Sparks, Nevada. The make the following claims about their thin crust pizza, which mirrors my own work in developing a Shakey's clone.1. They use fresh mozzarella.2. They ferment their dough for 24 hours, and make it in a Hobart mixer.3. Their sauce is made from thick (high specific gravity) puree.4. They add three pounds of spices to each batch of sauce, but don't give the size of the batch. If they puree fresh onions and add sugar or dextrose to the sauce, that would account for most of three pounds.5. They slice their own vegetables. Not sure if Shakey's uses pre-sliced vegetables these days.

So, they are doing what others who once worked at Shakey's posted. Even if they added a few herbs, spices, and flavors that were not used in any "official" Shakey's recipes, these pizzas should be outstanding since they use what a lot of really good independent pizzerias use.

The water, minced onion, basil and garlic are mixed in a saucepan and cooked until the dried onion is translucent. After letting the mixture cool, the wine, ground oregano, and dextrose is added and stirred. Finally, the pizza sauce is added to the saucepan and everything is thoroughly mixed. The mixture is then placed in a quart-size reclosable plastic storage bag and left in the refrigerator for two days, being periodically agitated by hand to mix the ingredients.

The pizza sauce already contains salt and citric acid. Adding salt and powdered citric acid was not necessary. Many sauces you buy today lists "natural flavor" as an ingredient. As mentioned in a previous post, we think whatever flavor(s) they are adding tastes a lot like wine. Barbera D'Asti wine was the best match out of several wines we tried. This wine was mentioned in a lot of Internet posts as being a good accompaniment to pizza.http://www.chiarlo.it/english/vini/barbera_d_asti/leorme/index.htm

A few remarks about the dry ingredients. After trying Spice Islands and Badia ground oregano, we think the Badia (Miami, FL) is a better match. It is a Hispanic market food item. We selected Lisy (Miami, FL) garlic powder as the best match. The closest match of basil leaves were the supermarket house brands made by McCormick; we bought it under the Hannaford label. The closest match of minced onions were the supermarket house brands produced by the ACH Food Companies, bought under the Food Lion label. The dextrose was bought from a nearby beer/wine home brewing store. Powdered citric acid, used in early experiments and with an Escalon tomato product, was purchased in a big international foods supermarket catering to Asian, Indian, and Hispanic customers.

The hardest part is finding a canned tomato product that duplicates the tomato paste and water mixture that they start with in the sauce factory. We literally tried every thick tomato product available at local supermarkets, as well as at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Super Walmart, including the new Classico line. We even obtained a #10 can of Heinz' current version of 1.06 specific gravity tomato puree. None of these products had the tomato flavor profile of the current Shakey's sauce. We now actually prefer the taste of this SuperDolce pizza sauce. This sauce has a coarser finish than the Shakey's sauce and can't be blended with much liquid because, according to Stanislaus,"Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The tradeoff for SuperDolce®’s super sweet flavor is that it contains less moisture-retaining pectin, so it won’t "hold" as much added moisture as its cousin, Saporito® Super Heavy Pizza Sauce".

I believe the best match will come from one of the California fresh pack tomato puree or pizza sauce foodservice products. I did try a batch using Stanislaus Full Red tomato paste, but it was not a good match. The problem for us is that while we have two local foodservice distributors that will sell cash-and-carry, they only sell in full case lots. We will price out a shipment from Penn Mac. We no longer have any samples of genuine Shakey's sauce, and it will be a few months before we receive anymore. We can't place any other common herbs or spices in this sauce other than those mentioned. Some of the early heat we experienced turned out coming from the pepperoni drippings. It is possible there are additional herbs and spices added to the mix, or it may just be some "natural flavors" turned out by such fine folks as Kerry Americas and Wild Flavors.

Again, the criteria we are using is to clone the sauce currently used at the corporate-owned locations in California. We are testing against actual samples of baked pizza and sauce.

If the (legal) bookmakers in England were taking bets on who was making Shakey's sauce, I would put a few pounds Sterling down on Neil Jones Food Company/San Benito.

... although I've posted this previously as text, this picture is an actual can of what we used to make sauce at Shakey's on the Rockville Pike (Rockville, MD), circa 1975. See my previous posts for my best recollections on the recipe, but simply said it was Puree (see can picture), water and spice mix bag(s). The bags were just that, sealed paper bags of spices (plastic lined); not pouches of premade sauce. Sorry, I have no information on the ingrediant list from the spice bags. When I left Shakey's and the town of Rockville many years ago, I really haven't had shakey's pizza since then, until only a couple years ago when I took the opportunity to visit the Rancho Cucamonga store in California, purportedly the official corporate store. I also visited a couple other LA-area stores while in the area. The sauce at the Rancho C store really stood out to me as being the same as I remembered. It had that ZING. No telling who makes it, but the sauce is definately a Shakey's packaged product (I watched the truck unload cases of it). Probably pouches of sauce. Enjoy - let me know any questions - Lightmeter

The recipe for the sauce made in Rockville is likely buried under the straw shown in this picture. It was taken February 6, 2012 and shows part of the fence surrounding the site of the former Shakey's in Rockville. I may try to get a better picture at some later point, but I wanted to document the location relative to other buildings in the same shopping center. There are still aerial photos of the building on yp.com and both aerial and street views from June 2009 over at Google Maps.

The photographs that lightmeter posted are truly remarkable. Its almost like the photo album of our lives. Here is an actual scan of the 2011 version of that Heinz puree label. The full 12 digit UPC number is 0-13000-57270-5. Heinz item number is 57270.

June 15, 2008 To master Shakey’s thin-crust pizza, Hunter sent his managers to several weeks of intensive training in California.The process involves mixing and proofing the dough and rolling it through a dough sheeter 12 to 14 times. Bubbles that form in the crust as the pizza travels through the conveyor oven have to be tapped down with a metal implement.“When you do this properly, the dough separates by layers and makes a very light and very crispy crust,” Hill said.He noted that thin-crust pies account for about 60 percent of pizza sales in Southern California, the rest come from pan pizza.